3 ms·
With "we" do you mean yourself personally, or rather as in "we, the markup community"? It's true that XHTML didn't came to be, but that's no reason to give up
by tannhaeuser 10y ago
With "we" do you mean yourself personally, or rather as in "we, the markup community"?
It's true that XHTML didn't came to be, but that's no reason to give up on structuring web content alltogether. A lot of workflows now are HTML-centric, and the used vocabularies are subsets/specializations/customizations of HTML. That's one area where SGML shines IMHO.
- kedean 10y agoStructuring is great, I agree. I meant specifically that the web community's attempt at applying XML principles to HTML was a failure. I believe that the reason is simply that it was structured in the wrong way. It focused more on how you format text than how you structure what the markup is representing. I think the semantic web is the right direction, where structuring is on the onus of the writer.
- tannhaeuser 10y agoSemantic markup for the web was on the roadmap back when XHTML was worked on, but I'm not sure it ever had a chance of adoption because the use cases for the web were (and are) infinite. Semantic web (RDFa), OTOH, can assert logical properties for arbitrary pieces of markup text; in particular, it's not necessary to use a "semantic" markup style (such as eg. DocBook). On the conference, Steven Pemberton, who is such an inspiring guy to meet, and also of ABC (Python's precursor) fame, gave a talk worth watching on YouTube. He was involved in XHTML on behalf of W3C.